What Will It Take for Japan to Change?

Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor for the Times of London and author of "People Who Eat Darkness," has lived in Japan for over two decades. Like other Tokyo-based correspondents, he rushed to the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan to cover the fallout from the massive tsunami that struck on March 11, 2011. Unlike most, he kept returning to the region, drawn not by the disaster and cleanup at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, but by the horrific tragedy that had struck the Okawa Primary School, where 74 children drowned. Parry spent months interviewing their parents, documenting their grief and, as they ran into a wall of obfuscation from the officials responsible for the students' safety, their fury.

His latest book, "Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone," is at the same time a portrait of a place and a way of life that's being swept away by demographics as much as by nature, as younger families abandon Tohoku in search of jobs and opportunity, leaving steadily graying communities behind. Already severely depopulated before "the wave," long-ignored Tohoku villages -- once known for sending rice, fighting men and courtesans to the capital -- now face a radically foreshortened future.